Of these the chasse au sanglier in Estremadura, and the pursuit of the bear by the oseros of the Asturias, are worth a passing notice.
When the acorns are falling from the oaks during the stillness of a moonlit night in the magnificent Estremenian woods, and the ripe chestnuts cover the ground, the valientes of the district assemble and wait for the boars to come down from their mountain fastnesses to feed. As soon as the snapping of some dry twig announces the ‘javato’s’ (boar’s) approach, a hound trained to give tongue to boar only is slipped, and as soon as his first note proclaims a find, a dozen strong half-bred mastiffs are despatched to his assistance.
Then for a while the hound-music frightens the shadows and shocks the silence of the sleeping woods; there is a crashing among the dry forest scrub, a breakneck scurry of mounted men among the timber; then the furious baying of the hounds and the noisy rush of the hunters converge towards one dark point among the shadows, and in the half light a great grizzly tusker dies beneath the cold steel, but not before he has written a lasting record of the hunt on the hide of some luckless hound. Pig-sticking proper, as practised in India, is not known in Spain, though possibly it might be practicable on the plains of Andalusia.
The bears of Spain are of two varieties—the large dark-coloured beast known as ‘carnicero,’ and said to prey upon goats, sheep, pigs, and even to pull down horned cattle upon occasion, and a smaller, lighter-coloured bear called ‘hormiguero’ or ant-eater, which is common in the Asturias, feeding upon roots, ants, and such-like humble fare.
Bear hunting in Spain is confined almost exclusively to the north, to the Pyrenees and Cantabrian highlands. Among the Asturias a kind of hunting brotherhood of peasants still survives, whose members face the bear armed only with pike and knife. These men (los oseros de España), with the assistance of a couple of sturdy dogs, seek out their quarry amid the recesses of the mountains, and slay or are slain in single combat. Their equipment is simple. A broad-bladed knife and a double dagger, each of whose triangular, razor-edged blades fits into a central handle, suffice them for weapons of offence. For defensive purposes they wear a thick sleeve composed of many layers of coarse cloth.
When the bear is brought to bay by the dogs the hunter rushes in; as the bear rises to grip his new assailant the osero plants his knife in Bruin’s chest, and then, as the animal lowers his head for a moment beneath the pain of the blow, the double dagger is driven home to the heart with all the power of the osero’s right arm.
This kind of bear-hunting is hereditary, the profession of osero passing from father to son with the peasants of the Asturias; but for the most part the bear is killed like other game in Spain, by means of large organised ‘drives’ or batidas.
Red deer are found locally and irregularly over several provinces of the Peninsula, differing in type from Scotch red deer in the absence of the shaggy mane or ruff on the neck, and in some slight modifications in the horns. Being chiefly forest deer their heads are narrow, and the animals slim built and game-like. They are found both in the mountains and among the extensive pine forests and scrub-covered plains; but the finest heads are obtained in the Sierra Morena, to the west of Cordova, though the deer are most numerous in the southern wooded plains of Andalusia, in which part of the Peninsula the writers of this chapter, forming two of a party of eight or ten guns, have killed from twenty to thirty stags in a week’s shooting, besides wild boar, lynx, and other beasts, and between sixty and seventy stags in a season.
Deer shooting usually begins in November and ends in February or early in March.
The following are measurements of heads that we have had the fortune to obtain in Andalusia. Though not the largest known, they are good typical heads:—